


he kindly stopped for me

by cartoonmoomba



Category: Final Fantasy XIII Series, Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII
Genre: all the tragedy though, psychologically Hope is not having a good time, supernatural? angst?, thanks Aloice, vague writing of a new world AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-25
Updated: 2018-04-25
Packaged: 2019-04-27 22:41:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14435679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cartoonmoomba/pseuds/cartoonmoomba
Summary: There is a Goddess living in his head. [Hope, a phantom Goddess, and God.]





	he kindly stopped for me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Aloice](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aloice/gifts).



> Disclaimer: Final Fantasy XIII does not belong to me.
> 
> Aloice requested this so here you go friend. Thank you for feeding my angst addiction.

There is a Goddess living in his head. 

Actually, that is not quite right: the more he thinks on it, the more she appears as a woman of only twenty one. Must deities forever be immortal and caged in a body of youth, with ancient shoulders bearing ancient weight? He does not have the answer—the Goddess in his head is certainly not one as such. Her hands are rough with callouses and her lips are pursed in a frown. _Goddesses are benevolent,_ some part of the child he used to be lectures him, strict tone and no-nonsense in his voice. 

Hope wonders, watching the trains come and go before him: _is_ his Goddess a Goddess? 

The passenger train disappears into the distance. His mother’s warm hand finds his and she leads them across the tracks to where his school awaits. 

 _That’s right_ , the gears in his mind shift, churning, churning like the cogs of machinery. _This is only—_ childhood. 

Hope Estheim runs to join his friends. 

.

.

The story starts like this: 

There is a boy and a woman and a planet— 

No. 

There is a boy and a woman and God— 

 _No_. 

.

.

Rewind.

.

.

There is a boy and a girl and a world not their own and a ghost seeking God. 

.

.

~~I am~~

~~not~~

~~_Him_.~~

.

.

“Good morning,” the barista at the counter speaks, pearly whites flashing and gold bangles sweeping colour onto her tanned skin. “What can I get for you?” 

Hope watches the jewelry on her wrists dangle, mesmerized by the colour and shine like a crow—his mother has always called him such pet names, endearments of animals one would not typically assign to a child. _You give him strange ideas, Nora,_ his father would chastise when he thinks Hope cannot hear or understand. _Why can’t you call him something normal, something not so… grotesque?_  

 _If you consider_ crows _grotesque,_ his mother answers in the memory Hope holds, _then I fear for your sensibilities. What’s wrong with crows, anyway?_  

 _What’s wrong with something like “honey” or “darling”?_ His father counters. Hope is… he thinks he must have been not even one, then. It’s so difficult to assign age in a memory one should not even have. How curious, this memory of his—sometimes he thinks he is a child. Sometimes he thinks he _was_ a child and… 

Well, it all goes downhill from there. He’s learned it is best not to linger in the parts of him that do not feel like Him. Monsters come out of their shadows when he does, under his bed and behind his eyelids and in his dreams and in the corners of his eyes. 

He shakes them all away, first one and then three and then seven and he is now nine and is he counting his age, or the number of eyes he feels settled on him when he dares turn astray? 

Time is a standstill. It does that, for him: he loses track of it like pennies falling out of his pockets when he runs too fast for the corner store, eager for ice-cream and not paying nearly enough attention to the change his father entrusted. _Tick, tick, tick_ —he finds it again as lint, and everything around is the same but different and no one seems to notice. Does _he_ stand still in time, then—he wonders, when he is old enough to understand the imaginary construct of time is not so imaginary for him—or does it stand still for _him_? 

 _Do other people_ , he burns to ask the world, _live entire lifetimes in the span of a second?_  

He’s going away again, down a path that veers and careens into things he does not yet know names for. Right, a _crow_ , he was remembering his mother and father and the sun in the kitchen and the experience of summer warmth for the first time on his skin. 

 _Well,_ his father keeps speaking, adjusting the glasses on his face and Hope never needs a pair of his own, his vision a perfect 20/20 for the entirety of his life. _Don’t you think “a murder of crows” is a little dark? He’s not even a toddler yet, and you’re already calling him something adjacent to that. It’s a little… ominous._  

Nora laughs. Hope likes his mother’s laugh: it’s loud and bold and not at all like a woman falling to her death in a city made for it. Sometimes he dreams of finding her corpse on a grassy plain, the smile on her not yet decomposed face making him cry and cry and cry. He wakes up with tears coating his eyelashes on those nights, and in the darkness the monsters leer and stretch their claws and— 

A hand steers him back. 

 _You don’t believe in omens,_ Nora teases and taps her husband with the end of her wooden spoon. At the kitchen table, Hope burbles and laughs and stretches for his parents: the both of them the sun in his tiny world, _mama_ and _dada_ and _mom_ and _i’m sorry i’m sorry i’m sorry._  

The smell of roses in the air. His mother always likes to receive them from Barthomolew, fluffing the petals and setting them in the nicest vase she owns. They sit bathed in the light of summer that first year of Hope’s life, and he sleeps to their scent cocooning his dreams. 

The present flashes, life restored, and Hope watches the bangles shine. The woman winks when she notices his stare—a pretty gesture for a pretty child, her smile wide and eyes bright as she punches his mother’s order into her machine. 

 _Do I know you_ , the Hope that is not Hope sleeping within him stirs, _from another life?_  

He does not give voice to the thought. Strange questions, he’s learned, became less adorable as one grows in age and presumed intelligence. 

Someone bumps into him and he draws further into the warmth of his mother, peering at the stranger from behind her legs. A behemoth of a boy, a scowl on his face as he shoulders past the customers and through the swinging gate at the barista’s side. Said woman rolls her eyes, swatting the kid on the back as he passes by her without so much as a _hello_. 

“Good to see you too, Snow,” she says with a smile that betrays the sarcasm of her tone. The boy flips her off over one shoulder and disappears into the back. 

“Kids,” the woman comments to Nora with a shake of her head, a camaraderie that Hope does not understand. Her smile is, yet again, a betrayal to her voice. Hope’s noticed lately that people do this: say things that they don’t really mean. 

Nora laughs in what he thinks might be agreement. She takes her coffee to go and leads him out to sit at the tables in the shade of the storefront. Together, they watch the world pass by around them, curled close together in the sweet, cold breeze of oncoming spring. 

There are rose bushes planted alongside the pedestrian street. Hope reaches over and breaks a flower, not yet aware of societal judgement for ruining someone’s property, and hands it to his mother. 

A woman sitting near them chuckles at the interaction. “How odd,” she remarks, trailing her own fingers over buds not yet open. 

“NORA Cafe is always the only place to have roses bloom so early in the season.” 

.

.

_“How do you know,” the Hope that is not him asks in a dream one night, “that she is only twenty-one?”_

.

.

He dreams of God. 

When he is a child, his grandfather takes him to church. Hope has no understanding of religion—of God, of benevolence—but he tries. He tries so hard to make the man happy. He reads the Bible; he clasps his hands and bows his head and confesses his sins. He gazes upon the stained glass windows of cathedrals and wonders if the light, falling multi-coloured and sparkling with dust, is God’s warm gaze breaching his soul. 

Hope opens his eyes and unclasps his hands. The floor has worn cold patches into his knees. 

In his dreams, there is no God. 

Well, that is incorrect to say—in his dreams, he is 

( ~~_I AM NOT HIM_ ~~ )

 God. 

 _Do I believe in God,_ Hope muses, watching the priest speak of genocide in Canaan, _if I dream of being the God?_  

In his dreams, he is God, and the Goddess plaguing his life is just—a girl. 

A girl. 

The priest switches tracks to the New Testament and Jesus proclaims: 

_Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword._

The wristwatch pressing down on Hope’s skin ticks ever onwards, tracking the imaginary passage of time until—silence. The world around the boy stills and dust sparkles like crystal suspended in air; the sunlight loses its warmth on his skin and the congregation is frozen in place. Hope’s knees creak when he stands, the toll of a bell in the church. 

Outside in the garden, the rose bushes sway. 

In his dreams, God watches the girl beat helplessly at the air around her. Confined and chained but not broken by the invisible bonds—he always _did_ admire her tenacity. _She’s only twenty-one_ , Hope thinks and he does not know how he knows of her age. Sometimes she is twenty-one and angry at the world, small and spherical around her and bursting at the seams to spill onto green fields. Other times, she is twenty-one and eternal and empty—a shell of herself, the perfect mould for his Goddess. He likes her best this way, when she is gradually forgetting her previous armour of steel and feathers; of a castle stretching to the sky, washed up in a dead world with a dead Queen and the dead never truly staying. 

Hope watches the sky and massages the pulse at his neck. A habit, even against his still veins. 

Words of poetry come to his lips, a classic tale he knows as well as the back of his hand— _because I could not stop for Death—_  

 _—he kindly stopped for me—_  

The gong of bells ring through the air and it is not his joints, but instead a warning from the Goddess in place of a God keeping her eyes on him. Leisurely, Hope makes his way back to the pews; he settles in, and bows his head; 

And he inhales, and the world spins to life, and the priest speaks. 

_For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law—_

  
In Hope’s dreams, God makes immortal a woman: Goddess touched, bittersweet, the perfume she does not wear a cloud of roses he rests his head upon. 

.

.

 _“Well,” the Hope that is not him says in a dream one night, “I suppose it could have gone that way.”_  

.

.

At eighteen, Hope sits in a far-too-comfortable chair before a far-too-confident woman. “Tell me what you see,” she says and all Hope wants to say in response is, _Rorshach tests are unreliable markers of a person’s mental state_ and _what part of Australia are you from? I’ve been meaning to visit._  

She holds up a paper and the ink bleeds before his eyes. Humans are meant to recognize shapes in everything—Hope opens his mouth and says, 

“Roses.” 

A dark eyebrow ticks up. _She is far too expressive for this_ , he thinks. 

She shuffles the page to the next one over. 

“Roses.” 

And 

“Roses.” 

And 

“Roses.” 

The woman flips the page towards herself and makes a noise of contemplation. “Well,” she says after a second, her tone joking but not quite concealing the confusion within. “Can’t say I’ve had someone with flowers on their mind before.” 

Hope cracks a smile in response, and the Goddess flickering in the sunlight behind the psychologist echoes it. “What can I say,” he says. 

“I’ve been an abnormality my whole life.” 

.

.

He meets the twins when he is thirteen, on a pier overlooking an ocean that does not appear to end. They are identical in looks and stature, a boy and a girl near his age with dark hair and smiling mouths and eyes like the colour of forests Hope has only ever read about. The boy rushes past him and cannonballs into the water amidst his peals of laughter—the splash he makes sends water cascading over Hope and the girl coming to stand beside him. Her sundress is drenched grey and she has sand on her skin: just another child on summer vacation, a presence in the endless throng of beachgoers and cacophony of noise. 

He cannot look away. His hands are clammy and his breath comes short and he is afraid, _afraid_ as she turns her gaze towards him— 

He opens his eyes. Cushioned on her lap, her fingers run themselves through his hair the back of his head is damp with seawater. 

“I’m sorry we could not be friends,” the girl speaks above him. Her eyes are endless as she gazes down upon him, her brother silently watching over her shoulder. Hope does not realize the salt water on his lips is the taste of his own tears until her soft fingers wipe them away. 

“I would have liked to be,” Yeul continues, her smile so familiar and bone-achingly like Mwynn’s, like Etro’s—the girl fashioned after a daughter fashioned after a mother—that Hope is overcome with grief and rage not quite his own. Her touch burns at his skin and he presses into it harder, weeping. 

The pain feels like salvation. 

“You will be free,” the almost-Yeul sighs and presses a kiss on his brow. Her back, arched against the blazing summer sun, stands out starkly against the sky—beside her, her brother offers a grin that makes Hope think of a city still in time and hunting monsters and a desperate man running away.   

“I promise.” 

Hope opens his eyes. The sun burns; there is the caw of seagulls, and he is alone on the pier. 

Everything aches and his lips are cracked with salt. Up ahead, for the briefest of seconds, the Goddess appears with a beckoning hand. 

.

.

The Goddess has always existed within Hope—a faceless presence in the beginning, the warm touch of her hand guiding him home when he first began to go astray. As Hope grows, so does she: the colour of her skin. 

Her hair. 

The smile of her mouth. 

Her hands rough with callouses. 

A strange weapon at her side. 

A silver necklace between her breasts. 

_But if time does not exist for me—_

 The train tracks they would cross on the way to elementary school and NORA’s Cafe demolished when he is seventeen

 A pier on a beach when he is thirteen and a girl and a boy he cannot remember except for the pain in the occasional dream

 His therapist with expressive eyes and a cocky accent and praying on his knees with his grandfather beside him 

_—then was there ever really a childhood? Was there ever truly a past?_

  _Is there a present?_

  _A future?_

  _A me?_  

.

.

The passenger train speeds past before him, the figures on the other side flashing in and out of existence. His mother’s warm hand clasping his own flickers at the same speed. Nora smiling at him, vases of roses in her hands; Nora fallen through a crack in the world towards the earth and grass; Nora with a rose he placed in her hair; Nora on a train with her hands bound and her body warm against him as he cries. 

The passenger train speeds past before him, the figures on the other side flashing in and out of existence. The church his grandfather would take him to, overlaid by the figure of God he has always dreamt of: a boy, and a man, and a deity. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—not quite in that order. Was he the son? Is the last dredges of him the spirit? The Father—is he the father to this world, to everyone who bows their heads and murmurs their prayers and call his name and say _amen_? 

The passenger train speeds past before him, the figures on the other side flashing in and out of existence. But there—in between the cars he glimpses her, the Goddess who has never led him astray. She beckons him from the other side, phantom like and real and the only thing he has ever been able to rely on. 

His hand slips from his mother’s—Hope is both child and man, and he is old enough to let his mother go. It would have never lasted, anyway—the dead have no place amongst the living. 

 _Am I alive?_ He steps towards the train tracks, the gong of church bells in his ears. They sound like heaven and God and someone screaming. 

 _Are_ you _alive?_ The Goddess answers but he cannot hear for the gap between them. The passenger train speeds past before him: closer, louder, the smell of metal and roses in the air. 

 _Did I… manage to save you?_  

Hope steps before the train, and the Goddess clasps his outstretched hand on the other side. 

.

.

 _“It took you long enough,” the Hope that has slowly become him says. The smile he wears is kind, and benevolent, and Hope knows it is a lie. “You certainly made me wait.”_  

.

.

A hand reaches for him, and she is too late.

 

 


End file.
